Matthew Curtis has written 5,500 words at Pellicle to define what IPA “means in terms of modern beer.”
I hung in there for all of them, primarily to see if he mentioned Cold IPA, one of my favorite versions of IPA.
He did, and wrote in part: “The beer is then fermented using a bottom fermenting yeast at warmer temperatures (not unlike a California common, or steam beer).”
I’ve recently been visiting, or revisiting, articles and books about the quest for authenticity. And were a brewer interested in producing a steam beer using the same yeast breweries did more than 100 years ago, well, that might be a problem.
In 1911, while conducting tests as part of another project at the University of California, T. Brailsford Robinson discovered just how different steam beer yeast acquired from California Brewing in San Francisco was from lager strains. “The yeast of the steam beer has accommodated itself to these conditions (warmer fermentation and the clarifier) to such an extent that it can no longer be employed for the preparation of lager beer, while lager-beer yeast may without difficulty be used for the manufacture of steam beer,” he wrote. “The cells of the typical steam-beer yeast are somewhat smaller than those of lager-beer yeast.”
(Should you want to read a history of steam beer that may not totally align with what you’ve read before I would suggest Brewing Local. Disclaimer: I wrote it.)
